Arms around each other, they walked into the sitting room and flopped onto a sofa.
“Glass of wine?” asked Derek.
Jennifer shook her head. “In a bit. I just want you to hold me for now. Stay close.” Her bottom lip quivered as she buried her head in his chest. “God, it’s horrible. Poor Trisha. We’ve got to find her, Derek. Got to.”
“And find the bastards responsible for whatever’s happened,” added Derek.
Jennifer pulled a tissue from a box on the coffee table in front of them and blew her nose. “You know, in spite of how daft it sounds, I’m not happy with the accomplice idea, not happy with more than one person being involved.”
“You think whoever dumped the car just walked away? Bit risky, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t. The Rappington road is hardly busy. The car must have been dumped during the night or very early in the morning, so the chances of someone passing are small enough. And the area is surrounded by fields and footpaths. Perhaps whoever dumped it went that way.”
“That would have to mean that it’s someone local, surely.”
“Maybe, but it’s not that far into Nottingham. The Trent’s pretty close and once across it, there are footpaths all the way to Beeston and beyond. Wouldn’t take long.”
“Yes, but remember the car the witnesses saw was facing the other way, as if it were heading away from Nottingham. You’re the one who spotted that. And anyway, to do what you just said, you’d have to cross the river and the nearest bridge is on Clifton Boulevard. It’s the only bridge for miles, unless they swam across.”
Jennifer sat up. “Let’s look at what we know. We know Trisha left the M1 at junction twenty-four. The traffic cams indicated she was alone in her car and there were no other cars following her. A few minutes later, she gets a puncture and almost loses control of her car on a tight bend. She’s shocked by that, shaken up. Don’t forget there’s a horrible storm as well. Then someone sees her car at an odd angle and stops—”
“Or he saw the incident and stopped,” suggested Derek.
“Yes, possibly. Anyway, he offers to help and changes her wheel. Has the lab come up with anything in the way of fingerprints or DNA from the Golf?”
“Nothing yet, no.”
“So what happens next? They are both soaked to the skin, drowned rats—”
“And if he does live locally,” cut in Derek, “he might have tried the old come-back-to-my-place routine. Would Trisha fall for that?”
Jennifer sighed. “Depends how young and good looking he was; it is Trisha we’re talking about. But even so, it’s a huge jump from ‘come back to mine’, even if said with intent, to killing someone, which must have happened otherwise why would it be necessary to dump her car?”
Derek leaned forward on the sofa, his hand pulling at his face. “Why did he dump the car and not the body?”
“Perhaps moving the body was difficult for some reason.”
“So why the car?”
“Too visible? Maybe it was outside his house and he wanted to get rid of it before anyone saw it there. Perhaps he has nosy neighbours.”
“Did Crawford say anything about house-to-house in the area? After all, the appeal for witnesses focussed on the Rappington road. There are several villages apart from Rappington that aren’t far away. If our man lives in one of those, perhaps a neighbour saw something.”
Jennifer frowned. “Crawford announced it this afternoon. Oh, it must have been while you were out seeing the witness in that old Mapperley case Crawford won’t let go of. I forgot to tell you when you got back: we’re starting house-to-house tomorrow.”
“Well, at least it will feel as if we’re doing something, even though house-to-house can be an exercise in frustration. And Saturday morning will be a good time to start; more people at home.”
“Yes, and in the meantime, if Trisha is dead and still in someone’s house, they have the problem of what they are going to do with her body. God! I can’t believe I’m saying that. Not about Trish.”
“No,” agreed Derek. “It’s unreal. Did Crawford say how he’s going to organise the house-to-house?”
“He’s given it to Neil, who said he thinks the best approach will be to start where Trisha was last seen alive, i.e. on the Rappington road, and work out from there. Visit every house, farm, small business, everything.”
Derek looked round from where he was still leaning forward. “You know whose house will be one of the first to be visited, don’t you?”
Jennifer frowned. “No, I don’t.”
“Gus Brooke’s. He and his wife Mo have a place just along the road towards the M1 from where Trisha’s car was last seen.”
“That’s right, they do. I’d forgotten that. Pity he chose to drive a different way home on Tuesday evening. He can’t have seen anything or he would have said. I wonder if Mo saw anything. Perhaps she was looking out of the window at the storm as Trisha’s car passed by, following another car.”
Derek was shaking his head. “No chance. Gus told me she’s away lecturing somewhere in Europe.”
Jennifer stared across the room. “So Gus is on his own, is he? I wonder why he was in such a bad way on Wednesday.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Gus Brooke’s mind was in increasing conflict, his thought processes a maze of indecision. He had to get rid of Trisha McVie’s body, remove it from his house before either Mo returned from her trip or the finger of suspicion pointed in his direction and his house was searched.
Was that likely to happen? It shouldn’t; he was simply one of the police officers involved in the case. Like all his colleagues, apart from Jennifer Cotton and the DCS, he had no known connection to the missing woman. But he had behaved like a prat on Wednesday, his nerve failing him on a number of occasions, and he hadn’t been much better the next day. And worse, there was a team of civilian officers assigned by Crawford working with the forensic lab on establishing possible alternatives for where the Golf could have gone before ending up at the derelict factory. Gus’s cottage would be one of the possibilities, maybe the best possibility. How likely were they to treat it as a strange coincidence and dismiss it? He didn’t know; he could only hope for the best.
But what he did know was that the body had to go and the only place he could think of was the factory. It ticked all the boxes even with the possibility it might be searched again sometime in the future, regardless of what the DCS had said. There wasn’t much he could do about that; he would have to take a chance because he didn’t have time to research anywhere else.
Excusing himself on the grounds that he was still feeling slightly odd, he left the SCF offices shortly before seven on Friday evening and headed home. But before arriving at the cottage and facing up to moving the body, he needed to confirm there was no longer a police presence at the Rappington factory, even though Crawford had said it had been handed back the previous evening.
He passed no cars on the Rappington road and the lane to the factory was deserted as he made his way along it. After stopping his car in front of the gates, he got out and walked closer to inspect the new padlock. He almost laughed out loud. The lock was hardly worthy of the name, the type of rubbish sold for suitcases that could be levered open with a screwdriver. The ones in his garage he could use as a replacement were far superior; he’d be able to drive all the way in.
It was seven thirty and the light was starting to fade. No one else would visit the site today and probably not over the weekend. Indeed, having fitted their long-overdue padlock, the factory owners were unlikely to have any pressing need to revisit the site at all.
He smiled to himself, a sense of relief lifting his spirits. He hadn’t been looking forward to carrying McVie’s body from his car along the footpath to the spot where he could get through the fence. It was quite a distance and even though he had planned to do it at around four in the morning, there was still a danger of being seen. Fitness fanatics were a weird bunch; some thought nothing of paci
ng the highways and byways at all times of the day or night. The flat, straight footpaths alongside the irrigation channels were a particular favourite.
Instead, he could now open the gates, drive through them and, after closing them, continue into the yard where he had dumped the Golf, his car out of sight of the lane while he hid the body. The road surfaces in the site were all concrete and after three days with no more rain, they were dry. With all the activity from police vehicles, any tyre prints from his car would disappear into the jumble of tracks already present.
By the time he returned to his cottage, Gus had made his plans. He would set his alarm for four in the morning and drive the body to the factory. He had found the perfect spot to hide the body when he was with the team searching the decaying buildings: one of a number of large metal bins at the rear of the upper floor open platform. He had looked inside two of them and found that both contained a jumble of heavy-duty ropes, most of them old and greasy. They would be ideal for covering the body.
The whole process shouldn’t take too long and with luck he would be back at the cottage by five, well before the residents of Rappington surfaced for their Saturday morning.
In the meantime, since he had to wait for darkness to fall before he could carry the body to the car, he decided to revisit everywhere Trisha McVie had been in the cottage, look at everything she might have touched, everywhere her blood might have splashed. He had done it once and been meticulous, but he had also been dog-tired and in shock over the whole incident. He was cooler now, more focussed, less likely to overlook small details. And anyway, it would do no harm to wash down both bathrooms again and check above and beneath every surface.
And sure enough, when he was down on his hands and knees with a torch examining the underside of the marble shelf supporting the hand basins in the master bathroom, he noticed a tiny spot of what appeared to be blood on the chrome surface of the drainpipe from the basin. Or was it rust? It shouldn’t be, the fittings had cost a fortune, but either way, you couldn’t be too careful. He swabbed the entire area with disinfectant, rubbing and polishing the surfaces until he was satisfied they were clean of any contamination.
His wallet was still soaking in one of the washbasins. Gus picked it out of the water and peered at its water-stained surface. The blood seemed to have gone, but he suspected the watermarks would always be there. He was reluctant to throw the wallet away and he tried to convince himself that the marks added to its appearance, a random pattern of dark and light leather. He would tell Mo he had dropped it in the garden in the rain where it soaked in the mud for several hours before he found it. It would be a way of underlining how much he valued it and hopefully appease her anger at it being spoiled.
He sighed, realising that he was deflecting his thoughts from the main task now that darkness had fallen. Trisha McVie’s body.
On arriving home, he had reversed his car into the short drive alongside the cottage, taking it as close to the garage side door and the kitchen door as he could. Now, it was time. After pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he left the cottage through the kitchen door, lifted up the car’s tailgate and switched off the interior light. With the kitchen lights also off and the kitchen door closed, the car was in darkness. Taking two bin liners from a pack he had bought on the way home, he spread them across the boot space.
Once inside the garage, he closed the door and turned on the light. He was immediately relieved to smell nothing more than the ordinary garage smells: his precautions had worked. He pulled the garden furniture out of the way and bent to pick up the body. When he had placed it there on Wednesday evening, the rigor mortis was still apparent, but now it seemed more flexible, yielding to his grip. It would make carrying it and stowing it in the car that much easier.
Five minutes later, the body was in the car, the white towels wrapping it covered with another black plastic sheet, and the items in the garage back in their normal places.
Now all he had to do was wait until four the following morning. And in the meantime, although he had never felt less like eating, he would force something simple down while avoiding the temptation of a glass of wine or a beer, and try to get some sleep.
Visions of Trisha McVie again haunted Gus’s night, the pulse of his alarm morphing into a dream where her body was rolling around his car and rocking it so alarmingly he was afraid it would overturn. He sat up in bed with a jolt, the silence of the cottage a welcome relief.
Dressed from head to toe in plain black lycra and wearing another pair of latex gloves, Gus made his way to his car and set off. He glanced at his watch. Eight minutes past four.
As he approached the lane leading to the factory, he switched off his lights and pulled to a halt. There was nothing on the road but he wanted his eyes to adjust to the moonlight before driving along the lane without his headlights on.
The bolt croppers made short work of the padlock and the chain was quickly removed. Once through the gates, Gus closed them behind him — he would secure them with the new padlock when he left — and drove into the entrance to the yard, stopping his car just before the end of the passage.
Leaning into the boot, he lifted Trisha McVie’s body, thought briefly about tossing it over his shoulder but then decided carrying it would be easier. He hurried across the yard to the main door. Inside, the darkness was complete as Gus stumbled in the direction of the steps. “Shit!” he muttered. “I need the head torch.”
He tried to balance Trish’s body on one knee while he fumbled in his jacket for the torch but it was too difficult and he was forced to put her down.
Panting with the effort of carrying the body up the stairs, Gus laid it on the ground in front of one of the storage bins at the rear of the platform area. He lifted the storage bin lid and peered inside. There was enough room to place the body on the ropes and cover it with more ropes from another bin. But after placing the body in the bin, he paused and stared down at the white towels wrapping it. They might have evidence on them from the garage or the car; they should be removed. What about the plastic bag covering the head? Could there be traces on that to connect the bag with the garage, the cottage or Gus himself? His own lycra clothing was less of a problem; it probably didn’t shed fibres. It would be sensible to bundle the towels and plastic bag in a bin bag and dump them in a communal rubbish bin in another village. But against all that, he didn’t want to see the body again, didn’t want to have those lifeless eyes staring in his direction, didn’t want to desecrate the body further by leaving it naked in this alien place.
After a few more moments of indecision, he made up his mind. Regardless of his feelings about the body, the towels had to go, as did the plastic bag covering the head. The effort of pulling on the ends of the towels rolled the body and as they came away, the body ended up exactly as he didn’t want it: face up.
Doing his best to avoid looking at Trish’s half-open eyes, he lifted ropes from the adjacent bin. It proved harder than he had imagined. They were heavy with many protruding sharp fibres that quickly shredded his gloves, forcing him to return to his car to put on several pairs of new ones.
Twenty minutes later, Gus stood back to admire his handiwork. Trisha’s body was now entirely covered by the ropes filling the remaining space in the metal bin. He closed the lid and for good measure, pulled a few more ropes from another bin on top of the lid, partly covering it.
After gathering up the towels and plastic, he took one last glance around before hurrying for the stairs. Twelve minutes later, he stepped from his car outside the cottage and quietly shut the driver’s door. It was four minutes past five; he had completed everything in less than an hour.
Standing in a steaming shower, Gus felt as if the last vestiges of his encounter with Trisha McVie were flushing away with the soapy water. Strangely, he felt little regret for what had happened to her even though he had no reason to wish her dead. It had been an accident, no more, and he could not be held responsible. He was no more guilty of murder or manslaughter th
an anyone else, although the law would doubtless see it otherwise.
All his actions following McVie’s death were acts of self-preservation, totally justifiable in the scheme of things. What use would it serve anyone for him to be locked up in prison, his life destroyed? Prison was for criminals, a place for penance and rehabilitation, a deterrent for others not to commit the same crimes. No deterrent was going to prevent accidents; they happened.
It was a pity that McVie’s body couldn’t be given the respect of a decent burial, but such a thing was out of his hands. Her body would now rest nestled among the ropes for many years and probably be reduced to a pile of bones by the time it was discovered. The most important thing was that there was nothing to connect him or his car or cottage with her or her car. He had covered it all. He could now stand back and watch while his colleagues continued to simmer in their frustration, something that would continue for a few weeks until more pressing issues took over and the McVie case was put on a back burner until it became just another cold case.
Fully refreshed, Gus dressed and made himself a fry-up and a mug of strong coffee for breakfast. While he was tucking in, he flipped open his laptop to find an email from Mo. She had tried to call him but couldn’t get an answer. He frowned. Why not? He retrieved his phone from his jacket and found out why: he had let the battery run down to nothing. Bugger it; he’d be in trouble with everyone from Cotton upwards if they had been trying to call him. He reached over and plugged the phone into a cable dangling from a socket near the outside door and returned his attention to the email. Mo was coming home early, arriving on Wednesday. She was pissed off that she’d missed the weekend, but she hoped they could make up for it next weekend.
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